The British media has given a considerable amount of exposure to Laura Bates and her initiative to collect for posterity examples of sexism reported by women and girls – The Everyday Sexism Project. We call it The Everyday Whining Project. In November 2013 we presented her with the inaugural ‘Whiny Woman of the Month’ award, her award certificate is here.

As a result of winning the award, she’s a member of The Whine Club, and can only end her membership if she makes a public commitment to stop whining, which we’re not anticipating will happen any time soon. Our article on the club was published by the most-visited and most influential men’s human rights advocacy website in the world, A Voice for Men. This link will take you to our articles which they’ve published. To access the one on The Whine Club, scroll down to 21 November 2013:

We thought it was time men and boys had a central resource in which to report some of the ways they’ve experienced women (and sometimes men) exhibiting sexist behaviour, and making sexist comments, with a view to manipulating and/or shaming and/or disadvantaging men and boys.

I debated with Laura Bates on the BBC Radio 2 programme The Jeremy Vine Show in March 2013 – here. The show regularly attracts 6-7 million listeners, and this one exposure led to numerous other BBC and LBC radio interviews. Most of them are on our YouTube channel.

The following comments were posted recently on Whinin’ Laura Bates’s website – honestly, we haven’t made them up – and should give you a flavour of the submissions her site publishes:

The Royal Mint will be giving away silver pennies in blue and pink pouches to those with babies born on the same day as Kate and William’s. Wonder who will get pink and who will get blue?

Purchased a new Hoover at the weekend. Pleasant enough experience at Curry’s, until I get to the tills. Male cashier asks if I need a hand getting it to the car, which I politely declined. He then advised me it was ‘really quite heavy’ (to which I quipped ‘well it’ll be me lugging it round the house’) and insisted I let him know if I do ‘decide I need a hand’. I appreciate it’s good customer service to ask the first time, but would you persist like this if I were male? I wouldn’t mind, but he looked weaker than I do, even with his penis.

So what was the hapless cashier to do? Presumably some customers – women in particular – initially decline the offer of help getting items to a car, but then change their minds when they realise how heavy or bulky an item is. If the man hadn’t made the second offer, and the woman had changed her mind (a woman’s prerogative, of course) it would surely – given her line of reasoning – have been reasonable for him to refuse to help. In which case she would presumably have posted a different complaint on Laura Bates’s website. Some women are never happy, are they? Such women are attracted to Bates’s website like moths to a flame.

How best to deal with the whiny women in your life? Whining is an incurable condition, usually caught in early childhood – maybe that’s why whiny women always sound like petulant little girls – and we recommend two options we’ve found work well when a woman starts to whine. Don’t leave it until she’s really wound you up. You don’t need that sort of headache-inducing misery in your life.

1. Walk sufficiently far away from a whiny women, that she’s no longer audible; or
2. Listen to some music through headphones, with the volume cranked up sufficiently high that you can no longer hear a word she’s saying.